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a pet of a cockroach.
    Jenkins and Hard-Eyes were gone, and Smoke didn’t care. Except, he thought, Those pricks have eaten the bird.
    But he heard a rustling behind him and turned to see Richard Pryor’s tailfeathers emerging from his canvas pouch. It had its head in a bag of bread.
    Smoke tried not to feel too happy about it, but it was useless. He felt good.
    A little dull-blue light shafted glumly from a hole in the ceiling. Probably from a window in the room above. Smoke looked around and saw that Hard-Eyes and Jenkins had taken all their stuff. Were definitely and completely gone. Truth was, he didn’t care much. Except he’d liked Hard-Eyes, and he knew Hard-Eyes had the necessary restlessness that Steinfeld looked for.
    But fuck it. At least the crow had signed up. “Richard!” Smoke shouted.
    The crow fluttered again and backed comically out of the pouch, looked at him with not a trace of remorse. The look said, Stop yelling, asshole.
    Smoke reached past the crow, into the pouch. The crow hopped onto his wrist.
    “Who trained you, huh?”
    The crow made a door-creaking sound in its throat.
    Smoke fed it the last of his cheese and said, “Looks like I blew the recruiting. They’re gone. Their gear is gone, so they aren’t coming back. Let’s go back to Steinfeld and ask if we can go with him to Paris.”
    But in the raft, when he let the currents whirl him through the echoing, swishing canyons of brick and concrete, under cover of the morning fog, he glimpsed another boat behind, and the silvery jut of the Weatherby, and knew then that Hard-Eyes was following him. Simply checking him out. And maybe Smoke would have his recruiting fee after all.

• 03 •
    It was utterly artificial, and it was the most natural thing in the world. And the world wasn’t a planet anymore.
    The world, now, for the Colonists, was an inter-relationship. The world was the inter-relationship between the Colony proper and its tethered satellites; between the Colony and the tethered satellites and the free-orbiting satellites, the moonbase, and various control stations on the planet Earth. Relating by lasered messages, microwaved data input, radio waves, fusion-powered ships. Each unit of information and material relation struggling to assert itself, driven by the will of the builders, despite the flux and surge of solar radiation, cosmic rays. And in fantastic defiance of the flotsam of space: meteors and asteroids.
    Their world was a web of data and materialized information, and at the center of the web: FirStep. Or just, The Colony. An artificial world, turned outside-in. Artificial, but in his dedication speech, five years before at the official opening of the still-uncompleted Colony, Dr. Benjamin Brian Rimpler asserted that something created of human artifice is more fully natural than a biologically conventional living organism; the Colony, Rimpler said, was a compounding of nature; a splendid elaboration of nature, as an anthill, together with its ants, is a natural growth demonstrating even more principles of nature than a leaf of grass.
    Claire was trying to get the general idea—human artifice as a product of nature—across to her first-grade class, and some of them understood, and others were indifferent, and still others rejected the idea out of some undefined resentment against comparing human colonies to insect colonies.
    Claire stood on a grassy knoll sculpted to look as if it had come there by geological chance, and around her sat twelve children. Six boys and six girls, as per demographic control.
    From the outside, the six-mile-long Colony looked like a cylinder that had swallowed something big and was digesting it boa-style. The bulge at its middle was a Bernal sphere, itself a mile and a half in diameter. The concave interior of the sphere was to have been the main inhabitable area of the Colony. It was Pellucidar. It was Mu, sunken Atlantis, the Hollow Earth. The landscape stretched away to an inside-out